Poet and writer Ocean Vuong has in just a few years established himself as a leading literary voice of his generation. With his own life as a point of departure – born in Vietnam and grown up in a working-class family in the US – his raw and crystal-clear writing deals with war and trauma, immigration experiences, class, masculinity, sexuality and alienation.

In his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, we meet 19-year-old Vietnamese-American Hai, as he is about to end his own life, but he is saved by a chance meeting with an old and senile Lithuanian woman, Grazina, and an eclectic group of co-workers in a run-down fast food restaurant.

In Vuong’s America, the idea that the outsiders of society and the working-class poor can escape poverty through hard work is exposed as a lie. The closest they get to a break from their dead end days are drugs, pills or a breather in the restaurant’s freezer. But through the story of Grazina, Hai and his colleagues, he shows how unexpected friendships and care for those around us can be a respite in all the hopelessness.

Ocean Vuong is the winner of the American Book Award, the Mark Twain Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award, to name a few. He is known for the award-winning and critically acclaimed titles Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Time Is A Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. His poetry is also clearly visible in his novels, vibrating with lyricism and metaphors that say with you after reading.

At the House of Literature, Vuong was joined by the Norwegian poet and editor Priya Bains for a conversation about loss and grief, chosen families and writing about the working-class poor.

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